We talk a lot in the digital industry about the overlap between search media and display media, and how when planned and operated in unison, there is a 1+1=3 benefit model that magically appears, resulting in higher returns than could be generated by those channels on their own. But does this overlap really exist, and does 1+1 really equal 3, or does is it actually just equal 2? In order to find out the answer, I recently asked several experienced figures within our industry for their insights and comment. AKQA Media – Drew Wahl, Director of Business Development Booyah Advertisin [...]

Related Topics: Search & Display | Search Ads: Behavioral Targeting | Search Ads: General

I know this industry evolves fast, but damn! Just 18 months ago, most media planners and search marketers had not heard of search retargeting, and already we are in what could easily be called version 3.0. With the agency hat back on (for today), we look at whether this tactic is living up to the growing hype. When the principle was first explained to me, I was running an agency display media team at a search agency that was focused on direct response clients; I was therefore interested in tactics that involved precise data points as a way to focus on user intent. Search retargeting seem [...]

Related Topics: Advanced | How To: SEM | Search & Display | Search Ads | Search Ads: Behavioral Targeting | Search Ads: Contextual

Last month, we discussed how display media has evolved to be more quantitative in Why Search Marketers Are The Future Media Planners, and ironically, how the skillset held by search marketers has become more relevant to display media than the skill set held by current media planners. Using the real-time environment of the media exchanges, ‘search retargeting’ is one of several techniques that has created a safe bridge for SEM marketers to move into display and see almost instant results, and it is the SEM budget holders that are trying it quicker than the media planners (and who often [...]

Related Topics: Advanced | How To | How To: SEM | Search & Display | Search Ads | Search Ads: Behavioral Targeting

Following my last post on behavioral targeting, which was an overview of the field, I will provide a more hands-on approach in this post. To briefly recap, behavioral targeting involves creating multiple "personas" that represent multiple users of your site, and using analytics to create a unique experience for each persona group based on observed and predicted behavior. The first step to a successful behavioral targeting process is finding the right targets. It is not always obvious which users should be "bucketed" together. Creating effective buckets requires knowledge about the site and [...]

Related Topics: Google: Analytics | How To: Analytics | Search Ads: Behavioral Targeting | SEM Tools: Web Analytics

Behavioral targeting (BT) has been the buzzword of the year for the last two years in the web analytics field. But is BT really all that important and valuable to the companies making use of it? The answer is usually yes. And does it take a team of PhDs to implement BT for a website? The answer is usually no. In this and a following post I will explain the value that behavioral targeting offers, and show how a marketer can make use of BT to make the website experience richer for users, and increase conversion rates. According to Wikipedia, there are two principal types of behavioral target [...]

Related Topics: Features: Analysis | Search Ads: Behavioral Targeting | SEM Tools: Web Analytics